Contrary to general expectations, Hitler’s speech did not contain his grand offer of peace but merely a highly general “appeal to reason.” This change was a first manifestation of his loss of hope, in the face of Churchill’s intransigence, of ever making peace with England. In order not to betray any sign of weakness, Hitler combined his appearance with a display of military power by appointing Göring Reichsmarshal and twelve generals field marshals. He also announced a large number of other promotions. But the principal indication of his real state of mind was the order he had already given three days before his address to the Reichstag: “Directive Number 16 on the preparation of a landing operation in England.” The code name Sea Lion was selected for this project.
Significantly, up to this point he had developed no ideas on the continuation of the war against England because this war did not fit into his design, and the changed situation had not prompted him to revise his strategy. Spoiled by luck and by the weakness of his enemies hitherto, he trusted in his genius, in fortune, in those fleeting opportunities he had learned to utilize so instantaneously. Directive Number 16 was rather evidence of chagrin than of definite operational intentions. The introductory sentence pointed clearly to that: “Since England, in spite of her militarily hopeless situation, as yet shows no signs of readiness for a rapprochement, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary to carry it out.”
It remains a possibility, therefore, that Hitler never seriously considered the landing in England but employed the project merely as a weapon in the war qf nerves. From the autumn of 1939 on, the military authorities, especially the commander in chief of the navy, Admiral Raeder, had repeatedly but vainly tried to interest him in the problems of a landing operation. And, in fact, as soon as Hitler assented to the plan he began introducing reservations and mentioning difficulties of the sort he had never previously recognized. Only five days after he had launched Sea Lion he spoke of the difficulties of the operation in extremely pessimistic terms. He demanded forty army divisions, a solution of the supply problem, complete mastery of the air, the establishment of an extensive system of heavy artillery along the Channel, and a large-scale mining operation; all this was to be accomplished in no more than six weeks. “If it is not certain that preparations can be completed by the beginning of September, other plans must be considered.”
Hitler’s qualms were not connected solely with his complexes about England. Rather, he well understood the type of resistance Churchill had alluded to. A world power with remote overseas bases had all sorts of ways of holding out. Invasion or conquest of the motherland was not necessarily defeat. For example, England could go on fighting from Canada, could draw him deeper and deeper into the conflict in the wrong area, and finally involve him in the dreaded war with the United States. Even if he succeeded in destroying the British Empire, Germany would not gain from that, as he commented in a conference on July 13, 1940, but “only Japan, America and others.” Consequently, with every step he took to intensify the war against England he was undermining his own position. Not only sentimental but also political reasons argued for his seeking England’s assistance rather than her defeat.
Out of such considerations Hitler, though with signs of embarrassment, developed his strategy of the following months: gradually to force England, by political maneuvering and by restricted military action, to make peace. Then he would after all be able, with his rear position secured, to undertake his march to the East. It was the old dream on which he was still fixated, the ideal constellation that he had pursued for so long by political means and which he now, undeterred, sought in open conflict.
The military means of applying pressure included the “siege” of the British Isles by the German submarine fleet and, above all, the air war against England. The paradoxes of his design emerged in the curiously halfhearted manner with which Hitler waged the struggle. Disregarding all the arguments of his military advisers, he refused to go over to the concept of “total” air or naval warfare. The Battle of Britain, the by now legendary air battle over England that began on August 13, 1940 (“Eagle Day”), with the first major raids on airfields and radar stations in the south of England, had to be broken off on September 16 after heavy losses because of bad weather conditions. The Luftwaffe had failed to achieve any one of its goals. British industrial potential had not been struck a really heavy blow, nor had the populace been psychologically crushed, nor had the Luftwaffe won air superiority. And although Admiral Raeder had reported a few days before that the navy was ready for the landing operation, Hitler postponed the project “for the present.” A directive from the High Command of the armed forces dated October 12 specified “that the preparations for the landing in England are from now until spring to be maintained solely as a means of political and military pressure upon England.”20 Operation Sea Lion had been abandoned.
The military actions were accompanied by an attempt to force England by political means to yield—by forming a “continental bloc” embracing all of Europe. This project seemed easily realizable. Part of Europe was already Fascist, another part allied to the Reich by sympathy or treaties, still another part conquered or vanquished; and the defeats had for the most part brought to the fore an imitative Fascism which so far had scarcely any following but still held power and the lure that went with power. His military triumphs had magnified the hypnotic aura emanating from Hitler and his regime. He was not only the awe-inspiring dictator of the Continent; he also seemed to embody power itself, the current of history and the wave of the future. The defeat of France, on the other hand, was felt to be proof of the impotence and approaching end of the democratic system. Petain expressed the prevailing disenchantment with democracy after the collapse of France by saying that his country “had been morally corrupted by politics.”21
The great continental coalition was to embrace all of Europe, including the Soviet Union, Spain, Portugal, and the remnant of unoccupied France that was ruled from Vichy. Alongside this project there were plans for attacking Great Britain on the periphery: taking up the conflict in the Mediterranean by conquering the two gateways to that area: Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. In this way England’s imperial position in North Africa and the Near East would be cracked open. There were other contingency plans hinging upon the occupation of Portugal’s Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, also the Azores and Madeira. Contacts were made with the government in Dublin; the Irish might well be interested in an alliance, and air bases there would be highly useful for the attack on England.
Beyond the military possibilities, a grand political perspective opened before Hitler one more time in this summer of 1940. Never had a Fascist Europe been closer, never German hegemony more within reach. For a while is almost seemed that he was grasping the opportunity being offered to him. At any rate, in the autumn of 1940 Hitler once more plunged into intense activity in the realm of foreign policy. He negotiated several times with the Spanish Foreign Minister, and in the second half of October went to Hendaye to meet Franco. Then he met Petain and his deputy, Laval, in Montoire. But aside from the Tripartite Pact, which was concluded on September 27 with Japan and Italy, his diplomatic efforts came to naught. A notable failure was the attempt made in the middle of November during a visit by Molotov in Berlin to include the Soviet Union within the Tripartite Pact and, by steering her to the British-dominated areas on the Indian Ocean, make her a partner in fresh plans for partitioning the world.
That all these overtures were without effect was no doubt because of that contempt for political action now dominating Hitler and which his new sense of triumphant achievement had only strengthened. As most of the preserved minutes demonstrate, his onetime skill at negotiation had yielded to conceited imperiousness, his former circumspect groping had given way to crude dishonesty; and instead of the finespun reasons with their persuasive half-truths of earlier years, his interlocutors more and more encountered the transparent egotism of one whose only argument was his super
ior power. But in the negotiations as in the parallel military plans such as Operation Felix (Gibraltar), Attila (preventive occupation of the remainder of France), and others, the impression remains that he took up such matters in a singularly distracted fashion and with divided interest. Sometimes he actually seemed inclined to abate all military activities against Great Britain and rest content with the purely chimerical effect of the continental bloc. For this seemed the only way to keep the United States from entering the war. Given his unswerving goal of eastward expansion, that possibility appeared an ever-growing threat which would wipe out all efforts, sacrifices, and designs.22
The fear of American intervention lent a new and menacing color to all considerations in the summer of 1940 and, above all, reinforced Hitler’s fear of the passing of time. Since the subjugation of France he had squandered his energy in curiously indecisive diplomatic and military actions. German troops were garrisoned from Narvik to Sicily, and from the beginning of 1941 on, called upon for help by a hapless Italian partner, they were also stationed in North Africa. But there was no guiding idea behind all the activity; the war was running away in undesired directions. This was what came of the war’s having been begun with reversed fronts, virtually for its own sake, and with no general plan. “Führer is obviously depressed,” his army adjutant noted about this time after a comprehensive situation report given by Hitler. “Impression that at the moment he does not know how the war ought to continue.”23
In the autumn, while the war was thus threatening to slip from his grasp, Hitler began to think it out afresh and to bring it back to a scheme. He had two alternatives. He might attempt after all to build a mighty bloc of powers which, by including the Soviet Union and Japan, might at the eleventh hour force a reversal of the United States’ position. That would involve considerable concessions in several directions and would also postpone for years the planned eastward expansion. On the other hand, he might seize the first possible moment to strike eastward, defeat the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, and form the bloc of powers not with a partner, but with a vassal.
For several months Hitler wavered. In the summer of 1940 he had been full of impatience to get the senseless and bothersome Western war over with. As early as June 2, during the assault upon Dunkirk, he had predicted that England would now be ready for a “reasonable conclusion of peace” so that he would have his “hands free at last” for his “great and proper task: the conflict with Bolshevism.”24 A few weeks later, on July 21, he called upon Brauchitsch to make “mental preparations” for the war against Russia. In the intoxication of victory during this period he had even considered making his assault on Russia in the autumn of that same year. It took a memorandum from the OKW and the Wehrmachtführungsstab to convince him of the unfeasibility of the plan. Nevertheless, since that time he had clearly abandoned his original idea of two confrontations at separate times. He was now of a mind to combine the war in the West with eastward expansion: the concept had widened to that of a single world war. On July 31 he explained this conception to General Halder:
England’s hope is Russia and America. If the hope of Russia is eliminated, America is eliminated also, because elimination of Russia will be followed by an enormous increase in the importance of Japan in the Far East…. Russia need tell England no more than that she does not want to have Germany great, and England will hope like a drowning man that in six or eight months the whole situation will be changed. But if Russia is smashed, England’s last hope is wiped out. Then Germany is the master of Europe and of the Balkans.
Decision: In the course of this war Russia must be finished off. Spring 1941.
In September, however, and once again early in November, Hitler appeared to waver another time and to prefer the idea of alliance. “Führer hopes to be able to incorporate Russia into the front against England,” Halder noted on November 1. But another entry only three days later pointed to the opposite: Hitler had said that Russia was going to remain “the whole problem of Europe. Everything must be done in order to prepare for the great reckoning.”
These vacillations appear to have come to a stop in the course of December, when Hitler seems to have made the decision that so thoroughly accorded with his nature, with his lifelong design, and with his present overestimation of himself: to begin the war with the Soviet Union as soon as possible. The re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the United States, and his conversation with Molotov, had evidently speeded the decision. At any rate, only a day after the Soviet Foreign Minister’s departure he commented that this would “not even remain a marriage of convenience.” He thereupon issued the order to scout out suitable terrain for a Führer’s headquarters in the East and for three command posts in the North, the Center and the South, and to build these “with maximum haste.” On December 17 he expatiated to General Jodi on his operational ideas for the campaign, and concluded with the remark that “we must solve all Continental European problems in 1941, since from 1942 on the United States would be in a position to intervene.”25 The decision to attack the Soviet Union even before the war in the West was decided has often been viewed as one of Hitler’s “blind,” “puzzling,” or “hardly comprehensible” resolves. Yet it contained more rationality, and at the same time more desperation, than is evident at first glance. Hitler himself ranked this order to attack as one of the many “most difficult decisions” he had to make. In the reflections that he dictated early in 1945 to Martin Bormann in the bunker beneath the chancellery, he declared:
During the war I had no more difficult decision to make than the attack upon Russia. I had always said that we must avoid a two-front war at all costs, and moreover no one will doubt that I more than anyone else had reflected upon Napoleon’s Russian experience. Then why this war against Russia, and why at the time I chose?
We had lost hope of being able to end the war by a successful invasion on English soil. For this country, ruled by stupid leaders, had refused to grant our hegemony in Europe and would not conclude a peace without victory with us as long as there was a Great Power on the Continent which in principle confronted the Reich as an adversary. Consequently the war would have to go on forever, with moreover increasingly active participation of the Americans. The importance of the American potential, the ceaseless rearmament… the closeness of the English coasts—all that meant that we rationally should not allow ourselves to be drawn into a war of long duration. For time—it is always a matter of time!—would necessarily be working more and more against us. In order to persuade the English to surrender, in order to compel them to make peace, we consequently had to dispel their hope of confronting us on the Continent with an enemy of our own class, that is, the Red Army. We had no choice; for us it was an inescapable compulsion to remove the Russian piece from the European chessboard. But there was also a second, equally cogent reason which would have been sufficient: the tremendous danger that Russia meant for us by the mere fact of her existence. It would necessarily be fatal for us if some day she attacked us.
Our sole chance to defeat Russia consisted in anticipating her…. We must not offer the Red Army any advantage of terrain, place our Autobahnen at her disposal for the deployment of her motorized formations, allow her the use of our railroad network to move men and materials. If we seized the initiative we could defeat her in her own country, in her swamps and moors, but not on the soil of so civilized a country as ours. That would have given them a springboard for the onslaught upon Europe.
Why 1941?… Because we could allow ourselves as little delay as possible, since our enemies in the West were steadily increasing their fighting power. Moreover, Stalin himself was by no means remaining inactive. Consequently, time was working against us on both fronts. The question therefore is not: “Why as early as June 22, 1941?” but “Why not earlier?”… In the course of the last weeks I was obsessed with the fear that Stalin might forestall me.26
All of Hitler’s cogitations in the summer and fall of 1940 were linked by the secr
et hope of remedying the stalled and misdirected military situation by a sudden, surprising sally of the sort that had often saved him from his various plights in the past. At the same time, such a sally might help him achieve his larger victory. In his fantasies the campaign against Russia was transformed into the unexpected turning point which like a touch from a magic wand would solve all difficulties and open the way to world dominion. Germany, he raved to his generals on January 9, 1941, would be “invulnerable. The gigantic spaces of Russia conceal immeasurable riches. Germany must dominate them economically and politically, but not annex them.” In that way she would have at her disposal all the potentialities for waging war against whole continents in the future. Then she could never again be defeated by anyone.
The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, as he imagined it, would give Japan the signal for her long-envisaged “southern expansion,” which she had hitherto postponed chiefly because of the Soviet threat to her rear. That expansion in turn would tie down the United States in the Pacific area and consequently draw the Americans away from Europe, so that Great Britain would be forced to surrender. By a far-flung threefold pincers movement over North Africa, the Near East, and the Caucasus, in conjunction with the conquest of Russia, he would push forward to Afghanistan. That country would then be used as a base from which to strike the stubborn British Empire at its heart, in India. Rule of the world was, as he saw it, within his grasp.
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